What an extremely sad album Words and Music by Saint Etienne is.

“When I was 10, I wanted to explore the world. There were these older kids at school, who’d gone all the way to Somerset just to see Peter Gabriel’s house. Peter Gabriel from Genesis,” clarifies Sarah Cracknell in the opener “Over The Border”. In a way, this clarification sets the way for events about to unfold in the course of the gorgeous, made-for-vinyl 13-track album full of beautiful, sad pop songs. An album that will be entirely lost on the generation that needs clarification about who Peter Gabriel is. An album that continues where “Teenage Winter” left off seven years ago.
Words and Music by Saint Etienne is, you see, a concept album about music. This should ensure a 9.2 point review at Pitchfork, had it not been for the fact Saint Etienne use synthesizers and Sarah Cracknell’s voice sounds nothing like that constipated sheep… ooops, typo, I was going to write Thom Yorke. It is an album about not just music, but also about records, magazines and aging in a world you no longer really understand. “Over the border, I’m growing older/Heaven only knows what’s on its way/Every single day, love is here to stay” coos Sarah melancholically. And it doesn’t get much more jolly further on. The current single, and second track on the album, “I’ve Got Your Music” name-checks “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, who died yesterday. “Tonight”, while ostensibly a happy song about anticipation of your favourite band, desperately hopes to escape the tedious life through music. “Popular” is about… the same subject, but with heartbreak added. “A while back I was very low/When this guy said I had to go/Oh boy, he broke my heart in two… All I wanna talk about is Touch Me, Touch Me/All I wanna hear about is Squeeze Me, Please Me/One time, two time, three time and again”. “DJ”, another dancey little number on the surface, is about “making out to the DJ” with a man who is going to break our heroine’s heart yet again. “When I Was Seventeen” and its companion “I Threw It All Away” convey the horrifying sentiment of someone who isn’t sure they lived their life the right way — and there is only “twenty five years, maybe more if I’m lucky” left. And “I’ve been pretty dumb and I spent all my money” doesn’t sound like Sarah is in a very good place in her life either.
At the end music will make it all alright, as long as the band, who “say they’re in love with synthesizers” will “open with an album track, a top 5 hit? no turning back”. Words and Music… is a sad record filled with nostalgia, no matter whether the songs are uptempo, midtempo or ballads, but at the same time it’s modern, varied, pretty, polished (but not too much), exciting and gorgeous. Listening to it feels a bit like being killed with rose petals by a really gorgeous person dressed in red velvet. Or perhaps it feels like listening to a new Saint Etienne album about records, b-sides and importance of music using iTunes. “He said it’s just the music, baby” sings Sarah in “DJ”, and you KNOW this is not going to end up well. “As she moves a little closer to kiss him, she only feels the cold night air”, we find out, and it’s obvious this man downloads music from torrent sites.
I love Saint Etienne, and I understand precisely what they mean. Generation X and Y have one thing in common: lack of interest in anything that used to make music so damn special. Saint Etienne are a band deeply in love with music and records, with the 7″ and 12″, with singles and b-sides and special editions and boxed sets and promo-only picture discs — living in a world where a CD single is considered nothing more than a waste of space and music is something you get for free, listen to on a mobile phone, then delete to make space for more and more and more and more disposable records by disposable pop stars. Madonna and Saint Etienne chose very different approaches towards this world; Madge made record in about three days, didn’t even pretend to have any interest in its longevity or artistic value, “promoted” it with two worst singles of her career, and now embarks on a tour that’s supposed to gross hundreds of millions of dollars — which was the point from the start. Saint Etienne made an extremely old-fashioned, introspective record about nostalgia for the time that passed away the day Napster was born, and embark on a tour of very tiny venues and two or three festivals.
“I didn’t go to church, I didn’t need to”, says Sarah in “Over The Border”. “I knew he loved me, cos he made me a tape. I played it in my bedroom, I lived in my bedroom. We all did.” This world doesn’t exist anymore. But the fans of Saint Etienne lived in it. And some of them still do — at least if you count the fact that 1,000 copies of the 3CD boxed set version of the album sold out in an hour, even though the price was steep and the packaging abilities of Universally Shit Music Store are well known among the Etienne fans. Because our love for Pete, Bob and Sarah is here to stay, especially if they deliver more music of quality as high as Words and Music by Saint Etienne.






